ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Dane’s earliest novels. The school novel, Regiment of Women (1917) debates marriage and spinsterhood within the context of a doomed lesbian relationship and argues for educational reforms to benefit girls, and Legend (1919), encrypts a writer-heroine’s secret lesbian desire. First the Blade (1918) writes back to the promotion, albeit unconvincing, of traditional models of femininity and marriage in these novels, through its heroine’s ultimate choice to stay single rather than compromise her principles and identity by marrying her inadequate male lover. These texts are thematically comparable to novels by Rosamond Lehmann, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Vita Sackville West which similarly centre on female homoerotic desire and in some cases also feature young single heroines who look to the natural world to protect their sense of identity and struggle to reconcile imaginative dispositions and modern (academic) opportunities with pre-war modes of femininity.
